Mailvox: so missing the point

GH writes:

In your article on the death penalty, I can’t believe you even compare killing someone who has taken the life of someone else with killing “innocent” people as with abortion or tyrannical governments have done. There’s a huge difference between killing someone because they have devalued human life enough to murder someone else and killing innocent people who have not murdered someone else. You can argue about the right to take someone’s life who has murdered, but don’t actually compare the killing of two different categories of people in your argument against the death penalty…. I won’t even go into your arguments about confusing morality with human legislation (are all laws amoral then?) or whether the Bible sanctions government to take a life which show your deep ignorance on what many Christians and theologians believe about how God sanctions the government.

Right, my deep ignorance. The point, my dear GH, is not that I am ignorant of how many Christians and theologians believe how God sanctions the government, but that I suspect they are wrong. If God sanctions all governments, then the answer to the following questions should be clear:

1. Is one morally obligated to obey a legal government order to send a Jew to the gas chamber? To prevent food from being delivered to a region?

2. If one is not morally obligated to obey an immoral government order, has that government lost the sanction of God upon issuing an immoral order?

3. How many immoral orders must a government issue and how many immoral acts must it engage in before the sanction of God is lost. Can a government ever lose the sanction of God?

The thrust of my argument is that since the government is capable of arbitrarily deciding guilt and innocence, it must not be permitted to kill anyone. Once the principle of capital punishment is ceded to the central power, it is simple a small matter of redefining previously innocent classes of individuals as guilty in order for the government to legally kill them. This has been done in the past, it is being done now and it will be done in the future. No amount of airy theosophizing will change this reality; in case it has escaped your attention, the United States of America is not a Christian theocracy.

Right now, only the criminal, the unborn and the cognitively inoperative can be killed with the approval of the US government. Is there anyone who doubts that the cognitively and developmentally disabled will soon be added to that list? Conservative Christians can continue to wring their hands about this while clinging to the death penalty if they wish; if they truly wish to push back the recent advances of the Ahrimaniacs, they would be wise to give it up and embrace a position that is 100 percent pro-life and is built around the principle of defanging the democidists.

They won’t, of course, because if they did, my whacked-out noir prediction would be turn out to be off base. And that just doesn’t happen very often, the S&P 500 aside.